


The Equation and the Hero

by 12drakon



Series: The Equation and the Hero [1]
Category: Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Crack, Alternate Universe - Dark, Apocalypse, Math Kink, Plug and Play Sexual Interfacing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-24
Updated: 2015-08-24
Packaged: 2018-04-17 02:03:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,672
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4648098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/12drakon/pseuds/12drakon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everyone on Cybertron suffers a mysterious sense of dread, and nobody knows what it means. Soundwave decides to find out, and hacks Vector Sigma for answers. Together, the mech and the supercomputer start a secret crusade to save Cybertron from itself. </p><p>Will they reduce the complexity of the problem in time to solve it? Do the Autobots or the Decepticons win the war? What happened to the glitchmouse? Soundwave tells it all, and he does not lie. But is he right?</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Equation and the Hero

**Author's Note:**

> Big thanks to [Aesoleucian](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Aesoleucian/pseuds/Aesoleucian/works) for beta reading and editing. It was awesome!
> 
> Big thanks to dragonofdispair for [myths and inspiring discussions](http://archiveofourown.org/series/302133) about them.

_Soundwave: superior._

This was not a brag, a threat, or a delusion. It was a fact, for it was quoted from the highest authority on Cybertron.

Cybertron was going to die. Everybody felt the dread, from the chief Council scientist to the smallest glitchmouse, which froze in the middle of the dark street, abandoning its simple pattern of escape. Ravage growled, pressed his ears down flat, and also froze on the brink of his pounce. They made a strange tableau against the faint silver gleam of the double moons: deathly still, dark silhouettes, one tiny and one large, optics too-bright in blue and red. The deeper shadow next to them, optics unlit, was the chief Council scientist, prone on his doorstep in stasis.

Soundwave gave his cassette’s head a calming pat and hacked the glitchmouse telepathically. He was still tired from hacking the scientist, but the little creature was many orders of magnitude simpler. It did not know words like “recombinant chaos” or “systemic collapse” - thank Primus, no words at all. But it had a processor, and thus a consciousness, and thus it felt something beyond words that Soundwave read loud and clear: _dread-death-blank._

Soundwave read the same data, the same feeling from the scientist, from the symbiote bond with Ravage, and from his own processor - the data packet bouncing around as if he was completely overrun by a virus. He didn’t know what that _blank_ meant. Neither did the mouse, the cat, or the chief Council scientist. Calling the feeling “systemic collapse” did nothing to alleviate the _dread-death_ part of it.

It was Soundwave’s job as the surveillance officer to know, so that night he personally went to the nearest Decepticon hideout. To the ragtag bunch of guerrillas there he issued an order, double rations of high grade from the cell’s emergency supply, and a dread-death threat on behalf of Megatron, more immediate than that vague feeling they all shared. For the first time in the short, violent history of their Cause, the Decepticons stormed a temple. Guards and priests fled; others fought and died; most froze like the glitchmouse and were ignored.

Soundwave stood alone in the locked, Decepticon-guarded inner sanctuary, by the wastefully elaborate altar-console. He plugged in his prehensile hardline cables, which some mechs called “tentacles.” He had to solve the Cybertron problem, to find the _blank_ , but nothing he had tried so far worked. Among other things, Vector Sigma was the most powerful processor on the planet, with a direct uplink (some believed) to the immeasurable computational power of Primus. It was logical to interface with it for a difficult problem. He estimated 98% probability of Vector Sigma’s firewalls frying his systems on the first hacking attempt. He would take these odds for Cybertron.

Soundwave only paused to access a simple memory: _his laser aiming beam hits a nearby wall, Ravage tenses, and then play-chases after the red spot, silently laughing through their bond, Soundwave indulging him, making the beam jump and dance, for a klik of respite from the endless fight for the Cause._ Just as he indulged himself now, for a few nanokliks of this recall, the last wish of the self-condemned. He closed the file and initiated the well-rehearsed process for one of his hacks, which some mechs called “mind rapes.”

Unlike mechs, who saw Soundwave and everything he did as weird, alien, and frightening, Vector Sigma didn’t seem to take the intrusion that way: it didn’t kill him in response, it didn’t even struggle. It had a processor, and thus a consciousness, and it claimed its goal was what Soundwave wanted: to fill in the _blank_. Soundwave felt desired and welcome, maybe even expected. Nobody else thought to ask Vector Sigma about _dread-death-blank_. Not the priests, not the Council scientists, not the new Prime with his direct access through the Matrix. Thus the conclusion Vector Sigma sent over their interface - _Soundwave: superior_.

The telepath silently laughed from the relief (2% chance of survival!), from the base pleasure of the resonating interface, and from making progress in his query. Vector Sigma was also feeling _dread-death-blank_ \- or, more accurately, experiencing it - as an equation. The supercomputer had the power to perceive the equation, but not to solve it.

Every problem a Cybertronian consciousness could sense had a complexity class. The scared glitchmouse ran to its hole, sensing the simple algebra of the shortest line from its nose to escape. The hunting Ravage dealt with the more advanced calculus of his dynamically changing, optimal intercept course. The mouse desperately wanted, but did not have the processing power, to comprehend the cat; and Vector Sigma could not communicate the mathematics of the world-ending equation to Soundwave. The telepath was shown a few sample parts, like variables for physical forces, tensors for microscopic interactions, and multi-dimensional matrices with mechs’ designations, one of them his own. What Soundwave read, loud and clear, was Vector Sigma’s perception - Primus’s perception, he assumed - of _dread-death_. To them, that feeling read as _too much complexity._ Cybertron was about to die, Vector Sigma had computed, because its problems had grown beyond the computational power of its creator.

That feeling of shared understanding with the supercomputer was ecstatic, no matter the dark data they exchanged. From the resonance with the powerful Vector Sigma, every circuit in Soundwave heated up, all his struts tensed, and his spark flared, his frame excited beyond anything he had felt in past interfaces with mere mechs. In the feedback data, Soundwave sensed how his own ruthless will was that last drop of energon that made the full cube overflow; that last joule of energy that made the overheated engine combust; that last parameter that tipped Vector Sigma from their shared despair toward enacting a hope. And a glimpse of that hope was the last harmonic that pushed Soundwave into the processor-shattering overload that did feel like the most probable outcome of this interface: his death.

~~~

Soundwave rebooted. He was on his knees, propped against the altar-console where he slid down, his armor crackling as it cooled, the air smelling sharply of ozone. His interface with Vector Sigma was still open, and he had enough functional circuits left to comprehend their hope - their only hope.

_Reduce complexity. Eliminate variables. Simplify the equation._

They couldn’t solve the problem of Cybertron. None of the mechs, nor Vector Sigma, not even Primus, could solve the equation and fill in that _blank_. But they could transform the problem into a simpler one that would compute.

Vector Sigma didn’t even mind helping Soundwave solve relatively simple tactical puzzles that would raze some of that complexity from the face of their planet.

~~~

The next week, the beautiful city-state of Vos burned. Its supposedly impenetrable defenses were hackable after all. Its prince defected to the attacking Decepticons after promises of the Air Commander post and a certain shuttleform mech for his own. Most of the citizens of Vos perished in atomic explosions that obliterated their crystal towers.

That evening, Megatron and his lieutenants were drinking to their victory and taking potshots that barely missed the Council ambassador, who they kept for entertainment after failed negotiations. Meanwhile, Soundwave locked himself in an inner sanctuary of an abandoned temple on the outskirts of the radioactive rubble that used to be Vos. He had thought himself a ruthless Decepticon, but he was numb from the shock of the many deaths he and Vector Sigma had caused today. So many matrices erased from the equation, each mech an infinite complexity of hopes, plans, and dreams. _Please, Primus, please, how could this be not enough? Why is the dread-death feeling even stronger?_

Soundwave sat low on his knees before linking up, not for his prayer - why would a powerful being care about his posture? - but because last time the interface had made him fall. He plugged his cables in, and Vector Sigma recognized him right away, handshake protocols taking no time at all. Their almost-instant resonance made Soundwave’s frame vibrate with the remembered overexcitement. It would take two mechs vorns to reach that speed of system synch, but Vector Sigma wasn’t a mech and, as it reminded him, Soundwave was superior.

The telepath checked the incomprehensible equation, or the bits and pieces of it he could touch in Vector Sigma’s mind. He felt like a blind glitchmouse trying to understand the chief Council scientist by pawing at the tip of his little finger. Vector Sigma showed Soundwave those parts of the equation that became simplified - some whole expressions that were razed together with Vos. It was such a computational relief for Vector Sigma to see some of the equation’s mess gone that Soundwave overloaded from its mere echo. Vector Sigma must have paced the data flow better, for Soundwave only had a soft reboot this time, and only blew a couple of minor fuses - easier to explain to the Decepticon medics than last week’s injuries. As before, once they fully synched, he heard loud and clear what he had to do. He’d save Cybertron, Soundwave silently promised his godly lover, no matter his dread and the cost in death.

 _Reduce complexity -_ check. Back to the mundane questions then, such as, _Which of Vos’s neighboring city-states to attack next: Tarn, Rodion, Harmonex, or?.._ And, once Soundwave, Vector Sigma, and supposedly Primus settled on the smaller Rodion, _What’s the optimal plan of the attack?_

Solving these simple puzzles still required resonance, still felt like a caress. Soundwave wondered if it felt good to Vector Sigma too, if Vector Sigma was even capable of such bodily pleasures. No matter. It wasn’t about that. They had a planet to save.

Tarn fell next, then Altihex, then, in a jump across the planet that caught their enemies by surprise, Protihex. Megatron was a simple gladiator, so he loved the simple strategies Soundwave proposed. Bomb the cities to the ground so there will be no need to defend them later. Kill most of the mechs: they are corrupt. Make the prisoners choose to join the Decepticon Cause on the spot or die. Don’t negotiate with the enemy: it’s a waste of time.

The attack strategies the telepath devised were nothing short of miracles. And, unlike Megatron’s other lieutenants, Soundwave never pestered the warlord for money or power, for titles or slaves to warm his berth. He only asked to keep a couple of Primus’s temples from destruction, and Megatron agreed without giving it a second thought.

~~~

Soundwave walked among the poisonous smoke, charred buildings, and greyed corpses. _Cybertron to Primus. Can you hack it now, Primus? What level of computational complexity is simple enough?_

He didn’t feel ruthless anymore, didn’t feel the despair of _dread-death_ , didn’t feel anything, just the numbness of the unknown _blank_. The equation was still too complex, and according to Vector Sigma the world was running out of time. Every week or so, Soundwave would enter a temple, kneel by the altar-console, synch with the supercomputer, and overload when he was shown how the equation was simplifying. For a few nanokliks after his reboot, he would feel an echo of hope and life. Soundwave thought Primus knew his knight in sooty unpolished armor wasn’t doing this dirty job for a frame and spark reward, but the affirmation felt good, felt proper and right. _Soundwave: superior._

The Galactic Council quarantined their whole sector (simpler: all the phase spaces that used to map interplanetary relations thus gone from the equation) and the remaining city-states fell in with the Autobots, following Optimus Prime in a desperate defence against the Decepticons’ ruthless onslaught (simpler: two powers instead of many). Mechs died by the thousands, and Vector Sigma shared how it experienced that, so Soundwave also got to experience each silenced voice as the relief of reduced complexity. Each mech’s complex matrix was erased from the equation forever as another spark joined the uniform, simpler Well where, as Optimus Prime put it, “all are one.”

When Iacon finally fell and Megatron personally pushed the wounded, half-conscious Prime into a smelter, the Matrix with the capital M (it had extra complexity, Vector Sigma explained) finally disappeared. That day Vector Sigma did something extraordinary over the interface, held and held that moment of full resonance until Soundwave was screaming his pleasure, finally able to see - if not comprehend - the full shape of the equation.

 _Simple enough, Primus? Please, Primus!_ \- Soundwave begged, whether for his release or for the few surviving Cybertronians, he didn’t quite know. But he had his answer, loud and clear, when he rebooted. So the war, what was left of it, continued.

Soon they ran out of Autobots, and Vector Sigma helped Soundwave figure out how to provoke infighting. Starscream led a revolt. With Soundwave’s carefully planted advice on both sides, the revolt came so close to overthrowing Megatron that the warlord didn’t object to executing the half of his army that (according to Soundwave) supported the traitor. Of course, these Decepticons didn’t go quietly, fighting and killing more mechs, and the survivors were left even more paranoid and murderous. It didn’t help that livable space shrank almost to nothing.

Vector Sigma still could not solve for _blank_ , Soundwave was sure of that - he now checked after each assassination, execution, or fight, what with so few mechs left. He had to shoot Megatron when the warlord belatedly realized he had nobody to lead, after his last troop committed group suicide (or so Soundwave told him). The telepath felt nothing at that last betrayed look on his former lord’s face. Vector Sigma could make new mechs from the Well as soon as things became simple enough to eliminate _dread-death_.

~~~

Soundwave saw a glitchmouse on the temple’s floor and let Ravage out to catch it. This was the last temple left on the planet, on an island in the sea of radioactive slag, and these were the last two mechs and two not-mechs alive. Still, everything he’d done before wasn’t enough to vanquish the _dread-death_ , to save the world, to solve for _blank_.

Linked to Vector Sigma, but too exhausted to gather any charge, Soundwave knelt and prayed like he’d never prayed before. He knew enough mathematics to believe that small changes could lead to big returns, that a Seeker angling his ailerons could cause a hurricane. He’d started this crusade assuming his will would tip the scales and save the world. Big changes certainly had happened on Cybertron, yet the equation was still unsolved, and he was running out of parameters to alter. _Please, Primus, let this mouse be enough, let it finally be enough_!

The mouse died, Vector Sigma shared the altered equation, and Soundwave knew. He clutched the edge of the altar-console so hard its durabyllium steel and the plating on his hands both dented, leaned his face into the cold diamond monitor, and cried, cried for the first time since he’d started this crusade, as if grieving at once for everything that had happened, everything that he had done. The offer of help came through the interface, and as before, he did everything Vector Sigma told him to do. He closed his end of the bond to his symbiote and waited, not turning around. He heard the temple’s defenses activating. Pain beyond pain exploded in his spark when Ravage died.

In the world of agony nothing remained but the equation, now with just two matrices left, but still impossibly complex. As if in a dream, Soundwave slowly got up from the floor and took a blaster out of his subspace. Let Primus and Vector Sigma start fresh. He was quite ready to go.

Apparently Primus had something else in mind. The floor shook, making Soundwave drop his weapon in surprise. There was an electromagnetic blast from far below, and Soundwave felt his interface with Vector Sigma shut down so abruptly his gyros gave up and he fell on his aft. His cables pulled the altar-console down to the floor, but now it was just a dumb piece of equipment, not a window into another being. Between him and Vector Sigma, one was more complex, and that consciousness not only decided to eliminate itself, but was quicker about it.

“Soundwave: superior,” read the screen, plain text the last message from his comrade and lover, or maybe his god.

He felt a new pang of grief, and thought bitterly that if simple processors were superior, they should have let the mouse live instead. He also realized Vector Sigma left an inheritance, an upload Soundwave must have missed because of the pain. So the equation was still in him, and he now had some of Vector Sigma’s knowledge, like the ability to measure the equation’s complexity. Soundwave _was_ the equation, the only matrix left, _dread-death-blank_ now reduced from the world to his sick processor and aching spark. He could not solve for _blank_ , and neither could Vector Sigma, even theoretically. He carefully disconnected from the dear console, gently laid the limp Ravage over his arm, cradled the glitchmouse in his hand, and walked out of the temple.

Soundwave sat on the doorstep under the cold stars, nothing but rubble around the tiny temple grounds and all the way to the horizon. He could go back for that blaster, but that would not solve the equation, just eliminate everything. 0=0 was true but meant nothing.

Here at the end of his crusade, he had nothing but the knowledge that even one mech was too complex to solve.

 

**Epilogue**

Soundwave had decided to live, and despite his grief, felt strangely at peace. _Dread-death_ was gone, as if that part of the virus had run its course, so all the complexity remained in the mysterious unsolved and unsolvable _blank_. Soundwave wondered about that. Was there no dread because Vector Sigma and he had finished their apocalypse? Or was it because he had stopped short of shooting himself for being unsolvable? Because he had finally stopped fighting against complexity and for determinism?

That was an interesting thought, and Soundwave speculated for a while, having all the time in the world to himself. Maybe the Prime and all the priests had been onto something, not discussing dread and death with Vector Sigma, trying to turn the world away from that path. Maybe Soundwave’s query had opened or strengthened the supercomputer’s uplink to something dangerous, not to Primus but to his colleague the god of deterministic chaos. Maybe everyone’s dread came from some spark-felt predictive feedback about a possible future, this future, where a certain ruthless Decepticon changed the course of the history by opening a wrong door. Maybe that prediction, so much stronger for a supercomputer, was why it felt like Vector Sigma had been waiting for him that first time, not surprised by the hack at all.

Vector Sigma’s computations kept telling it that life was too complex to be computed, even by an entity that set its equations in motion. Soundwave and his supercomputer lover, and whatever fragger of a god they uplinked to, hadn’t solved anything about life. They just thoroughly demonstrated that death wasn’t too complex, that death and dread, if you focused on them, were entirely within computational reach. When you put it like that, it seemed blindingly obvious, something even a glitchmouse would already know.

Soundwave chuckled, not planning to cry again this night or this vorn.

Now what? _You know what_ , said a presence in his processor he recognized as Vector Sigma. It wasn’t really the supercomputer, but the inherited files that were organized as a pseudo-persona in a partition of Soundwave’s memory banks. Maybe the ever-helpful Vector Sigma had done that to save its lover from entirely deterministic, and even predictable, loneliness-induced glitches.

Enough of those speculations. The crusade was over, and it was time to work, just work. _And don’t give me any of that “Soundwave: superior” scrap_ , he thought sternly, both to Vector Sigma’s memory and as his last prayer to Primus, Unicron, or whoever it had been - might had been - beyond Vector Sigma’s uplink. These entities, for all practical purposes, didn’t exist for him anymore. The Matrix had melted with Optimus Prime and the real Vector Sigma was gone.

Work. Vector Sigma’s memories informed Soundwave that each temple had a hidden emergency spaceship, which he now had to find. Then he had to search the universe for the Cybertronians who had escaped and scattered beyond their quarantined planet. Once he found enough mechs and obtained enough resources, they could land by this temple, live on its ample cache of supplies till they cyberformed a piece of the planet, and then build some protoforms. And then they could go down through the temple’s access hatch to the Well, fish out some sparks, make the protoforms into mechs, and start all over again. Vector Sigma knew what to do with sparks and protoforms, and now Soundwave did too.

Speaking of valuable knowledge, he would make very sure everybody knew what to do about their _blanks_. When mechs felt the ruthless urge to seek a _blank_ , to fill a _blank_ , or maybe to go on a crusade for the sake of a _blank_ , they could go cyberform another piece of their slagged, _blank_ planet. Or, when they built all of Cybertron back, they could work on some other _blankety-blank_ place in the multiverse. Theoretically, empirically, and theologically, _blank_ wasn’t something you found, discovered, or predicted. You made it up as you went along, as simple and as complex as that.

Oh, Soundwave would explain all that, to every mech. He wasn’t superior, but he was a telepath, a hacker, and now a proud owner of a temple.

Soundwave put down the dead things he held, and went in for a drink. He was already planning myriad practical things, like what to tell the runaway Cybertronians so they would follow him. In his experience, almost nobody could relate to mysticism or theoretical complexity. He drew a cube of high grade, lifted it in a toast, and tried out a simple message, “Decepticons: won.”

It sounded about right.

**Author's Note:**

> Rizobact drew an illustration of the scene at the end where Soundwave is all alone and lost. It's beautiful - check it out! 
> 
>  
> 
> [Irreducible, by Rizobact.](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5337167)


End file.
